If you haven’t already, this is a great time to decide on what you want to be planting this spring. It will depend on where in the country you are, but I am ready to start sowing all my seeds ready for spring seedlings. I am sowing seeds for our vege gardens, food forest, and our new syntropic (firewood) tree rows. My biggest challenge is trying to fit all my seed trays into my temporary polyhouse and to also keep the cheeky cats and crazy dog off them!
You can also be preparing garden beds ready for spring planting, start sprouting your potatoes (ready for a Christmas harvest) and kumura, and you can keep planting the more cold hardy vege seedlings into your vege gardens like beetroot, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, silverbeet, and radishes.
I’m just deciding on where I’m going to build my tipu box (to ensure it’s warm enough) so I can try growing kumara again this year. Last year’s first attempt wasn’t great but as always, it was a great learning opportunity.
Another thing I will be doing on a sunny day is weed eating where my new vege gardens and food forest nests are going to go in next year. Grass is really good at getting rid of grass so I’m going to keep piling the cut kikuyu on itself for 10-12 months before I do move onto cultivating the soil and preparing the planting spaces.
SYNTROPIC FIREWOOD ROWS
With the building of our new home, and the main feature in our kitchen being a nearly 2m wide wood-burning fire from Homewood Stoves, we are going to need a good supply of firewood in the future. With this in mind, we are going to install multiple tree rows which are going to be grown for firewood. To stack functions in this space, we’ll also be underplanting the eucalyptus nitens and botryoides with elderberry, black currents (I found one that only needs low chill hours), other berries, and ground covers like alpine strawberries. We will make sure we get plenty of propagating material from all the underplanting so we can replicate and continue this cycle around the farm, so we have a good succession of firewood. I have started to sow the eucalyptus seeds this month and hoping to find some more elderberry and blackcurrant propagating material locally to get us started.
FOOD FOREST
If the weather is warming up towards the end of the month, I will be doing a full chop and drop in the food forest and planting to fill up any gaps. Ideally, you want to do these two things closely together as the pulse of growth hormones from the pruned plants will help the new plants to grow. I will also be topping up any areas that are a bit light in mulch.
I will be grabbing as much propagation material as I can during the chop n drop for replanting in our new syntropic systems.
If the weather isn’t warm enough by the end of the month, I will delay this until next month.
We had leaf curl on our new heritage fruit trees last year so will be doing a copper spray once the buds come out, but before they flower (so we don’t hurt the bees), and then again in two weeks. I’m hoping that as the food forest thrives, we increase biodiversity, soil heath etc, that this won’t be an ongoing issue. I don’t really want to have to use copper but last year the leaves ‘curled’ then dropped straight off so I’m a bit concerned that if this happens again this year that my trees may not handle the stress.
Happy gardening!